My doting on black fathers — God forbid — drew a predictable tirade of angry rants from some readers who refuse to see the silver lining.

Instead, all they want to focus on is the extremely high rate of out-of-wedlock births — an estimated 72 percent — in the black community.

That statistic, they say, is the elephant in the room that I opted to ignore.

And thus, they argue, the “absent black father” is not a myth, as new studies suggest, but a dire fact of life for too many.

Look, I have no problem at all with talking about the breakdown of black families or, for that matter, black neighborhoods in which doctors and janitors and teachers all once commonly lived on the same block.

I’ve talked about this for years. If the black community is ever going to reach its full potential in America, restoring family life and rebuilding robust, socioeconomically diverse neighborhoods are musts. Along with a sustained push for a good education.

But here’s the problem I have with the negative, sometimes ugly, feedback I got about the column I wrote two weeks ago: Too many of the haters don’t get it.

They are unable to entertain the possibility that there’s more than one truth about black families in general and black men in particular.

So they hang their hats on the same old hooks, on stories and stats that focus solely on the pathologies of black life — the thugs, the hoodlums.

They don’t want to dig deeper.

Again, that is precisely why it was so hard, even three decades ago, for many Americans to swallow The Cosby Show as plausible or “realistic.” The show cut against the grain, daring to paint a different and broader picture of black life.

Even some black folks couldn’t recognize themselves in the privileged characters, because that’s not how they’d been conditioned to see themselves — or their potential.

And so it is with us black men.

We can’t catch a break, not even those of us who’re clocking in every day and trying to do the right thing. We get lumped together in a negative narrative that knows no limits and fails to provide context, perspective or balance.

I merely offered one sliver of truth, new research that cast black fathers in a more positive light. I might as well have declared that Santa Claus is black and coming to a neighborhood near you.

What I focused on was a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that showed that most men who live in the same household with their kids are actively involved in their children’s lives.

Most of the dads play and eat with their children daily. This bears repeating: More than 7 in 10 black men also bathed, dressed or put diapers on their kids, compared with 6 in 10 white men and about 45 percent of Latinos.

A Pew Research Center study also debunks the myth that black fathers aren’t engaged.

The involvement, of course, drops off substantially when dads don’t live under the same roof. That’s a given.

Yet, I dutifully pointed it out and carefully noted “there still are too many broken homes and too many fathers not living with their children, especially in the black community.”

But that wasn’t enough for those trained solely on the out-of-wedlock births. They want to hammer away on black America.

“The ‘absent black father’ is absolutely NOT a myth and you know it,” wrote one reader, Jack, from McKinney. “You never once owned up to the fact that the race with the highest percentage of having a single parent family is African-American.”

OK, Jack. There it is.

The percentage of out-of-wedlock births has almost doubled since 1970, a reflection of shifting morals and cultural values across all ethnic groups.

The good news is that the birth rate for unmarried black women is waning, not going up. And those out-of-wedlock birth stats look worse in part because married black women are having fewer babies, thus inflating the percentages.

But we’ll save that for another day.

For now, for once, it would do us a world of good to acknowledge the black fathers who aren’t absent. That sends a powerful message to those who are.

“Thanks so much for the insight and myth of the absent black father,” wrote one African-American woman, a former TV anchor. “I grew up in a middle-class neighborhood and everyone had involved dads.”

That’s not everyone’s story, of course. But it’s also one that’s far too seldom shared in the mainstream — which makes it harder for some to believe.